


Sunshine

by HeartOfTheMirror



Category: Captain America (Movies), Kings (TV 2009)
Genre: Biting, Desperation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Frottage, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Last Day On Earth, M/M, Trials, Winter Soldier Trial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 09:26:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8527798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeartOfTheMirror/pseuds/HeartOfTheMirror
Summary: Former Crown Prince James "Bucky" Barnes is ready to accept the consequences of his time as the Winter Soldier now that the war is over.King Steve is not.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Stucky chat and my need to express some feelings left over from recent events.
> 
> This is just a quick little unedited thing to make me feel better. Nothing amazing. Hope you like it anyway.

Bucky wiped the tears from his face. His eyes, sore and dry though they were, wouldn’t close when he rolled over and pulled the blanket up higher around his shoulders. 

He hadn’t wanted this. He hadn’t wanted any of this.

The knock on the door didn’t surprise him somehow.

“Come in,” he croaked with what was left of his voice. He felt like someone had shoved a cue-ball down his throat, choking him. He wiped his hot, damp face again somehow still needing to look his best for Steve even in these circumstances. 

The door crept open slowly and then there he was, Bucky’s angel, his babydoll. Steve all but tip-toed in, his shoulders hunched forward and his knees bent like any of that could diminish his presence in Bucky’s sight. The former crown prince had seen his savior more confident and comfortable visiting patients in hospice rooms. 

Then again, everything was a little different when it was someone you knew who was going to die. 

“I’m not going to let them do it, Buck,” Steve said in that steady, reassuring tone that meant he was about to go completely off the rails. He approached the bed the way people approached a castle made of playing cards. It was refreshing, actually. Most days people looked at Bucky one of two ways- like he was a chained and dangerous tiger that had to be put down, or like he was a side of rotting beef that someone had failed, thus far, to drag from the center of the road where it had already been struck and killed. 

To be thought of as something delicate. Precious. That feeling Bucky wanted to hold in his hand and gasp in existential awe over. More beautiful even than the butterflies that had crowned Steve once again at his trial. As if God had anything on Steve Rogers. Bucky’s only God in these, his last days, had clear blue eyes and straw blond hair.

“You can’t stop them,” Bucky rasped, barely scraping together the emotion to sound apologetic. He was tapped out. It had all been too much, too quickly. He had nothing left to give. No tears, not even any pain. He had been washed clean by the tidal force of his own despair. 

“They said that about the Goliath tanks too. Turns out you can do anything you put your mind to, these days.” Bucky felt his face go through the motions of a weak little smile but even Steve’s steadfast devotion and belief in altruism and justice couldn’t pull anything up out of the barren field where Bucky had once grown his fucks. It had been burned and salted yesterday. That that remained were layers of feted ash that muted anything which might have once caused him pain or joy.

“Steve,” Bucky whispered with his abused voice. He reached out and Steve snapped to action, sitting on the bed beside Bucky and clinging to the former crown prince’s hand with both of his. “I don’t want you to feel bad about what has to happen. I think we both knew, deep down, that it always had to end this way. The people need a clear direction going forward. You have a way of bringing light even to the people who flinch away from it, like I used to. Do you remember? When you found me in that hole where Hydra had dumped me? I was everything they said-“

“No, Bucky!” Steve interrupted, pulling Bucky’s hand, still gripped between Steve’s massive, calloused mitts, to his chest. As though resting Bucky’s hand over Steve’s heart could somehow change a single damn thing that had happened in the past year.

God, Bucky still felt that overwhelming urge to bite and lick that naivety from Steve’s lips. To hold him down and fuck wildly into that otherworldly beauty, that pool of utter, impossibly inhuman goodness.

“For so long I wanted nothing more than to drag you into the muck and the darkness with me,” Bucky confessed. He licked his chapped lips, noticed absently that they’d cracked and started bleeding in at least two places. He hadn’t really drank or eaten much since the trial began. He must look a fright in Steve’s eyes. 

“I would have climbed down there myself just to pull you out of it,” Steve promised, uncovering just enough of Bucky’s hand to press a reverent kiss to it. Steve’s cheek was warm and smooth under Bucky’s palm when he lifted it in the last, paltriest, benediction he could possibly give.

“It’s not your fault,” Bucky promised, meeting Steve’s eyes and holding them as firmly as he could. “None of it. You did everything that you could and I don’t blame you for a goddamn bit of it, okay?” 

“Bucky,” Steve pleaded, his voice wavering and his chin wobbling as he leaned forward, impossibly further into Bucky’s space.

“It was worth it, Bucky insisted fiercely.” If this was his last true testament then he was going to make it count. “Even… even what Hydra did to me. It was all worth it. For you. To get you here. To get to be with you even for-”

Steve cut him off with a harsh kiss. Fighting dirty, just like he always did and no one ever expected. 

Bucky moaned into it, his whole body arching towards Steve’s, the way it always did. “Oh,” he gasped as Steve’s arms came around him and pulled him off the mattress and held him fast between Steve’s hard body and his implacable arms. Steve’s teeth nipped at Bucky’s neck as Bucky’s fingers scratched wildly at the wool of Steve’s dress uniform. 

Bucky tried his utmost to not remember how Steve looked in that uniform sermonizing righteously from the witness stand at the trial. His hand tangled in the golden ropes swinging from Steve’s shoulder and he grabbed hold. Anything to keep him close to his lover. Anything. Anything.

Steve’s blunt nails scraped against the back of Bucky’s neck. And Bucky felt claimed, collared, and owned as he never had in all his days as a prisoner of the state.

“They can’t take you away from me,” Steve growled, his breath and lips brushing over the damp sensitive skin of Bucky’s neck. And then, without a second’s pause, Steve bit down hard enough that a weak heady little moan took float from his throat.

“Please,” he begged, broken apart entirely. 

“Yes,” Steve said, sounding almost as desperate as Bucky now. He pulled the blanket away with surprising care and pressed Bucky back to the bed, one hand caressing his lover’s belly button where his thin cotton pajamas had ridden up. Steve’s fingertips lingered tantalizingly over the soft trail of hair that lead down under the drawstring bottoms which hid so little.

“Fuck,” Steve breathed. That exact same tone, back when they were on the front lines it used to mean a grenade or maybe a landmine. How many times had that stupid Frisbee saved them both? Bucky couldn’t help but wonder. Saved his body so many times that eventually his heart followed, and with it what remained of his soul.

Bucky laid back, watching as his babydoll took apart his uniform the way Bucky took apart his guns- feigned irreverence which belied the utmost of care and familiarity. 

Bucky licked his bloody lips, noticing for the first time the faint reddish smear across his lover’s mouth. All at once the haze of heat that Steve inspired in him flared up to a blinding and deafening inferno. Every gossamer hair, every supple millimeter of Bucky’s skin was suddenly hypersensitive to the air, the brush of the worn-soft cotton sheets, the impossible, intolerable distance between himself and his babydoll. 

Steve prowled across the bed and slid himself languorously up Bucky, rubbing first his thick titties and then his washboard abs over Bucky’s erection, making Bucky groan and thrash like a wild thing, insensate with pleasure. Steve’s lips preceded him, brushing along Bucky’s skin like a promise. 

Bucky hardly even noticed when Steve’s fingers slipped under Bucky’s trousers and pulled them away. There wasn’t time for anything fancy, not with the urgency the both of them were feeling, with the morbid deadline that neither of them could wholly forget. 

They gripped at each other, planting purple blooms of possession and fever on each other.

…

Bucky woke alone. He’d fallen asleep fucked-out and utterly content in his fate petted and cherished in Steve’s strong arms. And now his lover was gone, the sheets cold.

He was okay with that.

If he was to walk to the gallows, in fact, he’d prefer not to see Steve on the way there, except perhaps at the very last moment. Then, as he took that final long walk, he wanted nothing in his field of view but Steve’s smiling face in the haloed brilliance of the sun. 

Bucky dressed quietly. His mind was calm. In many ways his punishment would come as a relief; not just to a nation searching for absolute security in the permanence of their new King’s position, or to the court jackals who’d hated him from infancy thanks to his increasingly erratic and irredeemable father. To Bucky the swift release of death would be, if nothing else, an end to the impossible situation he’d been in since birth. First as the gay son of a King anointed by a supposedly intolerant God, and then as the disgraced soldier whose war crimes were difficult to forgive even when it had been Hydra behind the wheel, and then as the secret lover of the new King who had (thankfully) supplanted Bucky’s inheritance.

The Old King’s death had freed Bucky of one of those burdens. Only his own death could free him from the others.

But as he walked out into the hall he was not confronted by the stony-faced guards he’d been expecting but by royal footmen and pages. They inclined their heads to him all at once, perfect life-size automatons. 

“What?” Bucky said, stepping out further, looking around for someone who might have answers. 

“His Royal Highness is waiting for you in the parlor,” the nearest of the pages said with deference. Bucky thanked the man hastily and went to find Steve. His babydoll had some fucking explaining to do, to say the least.

…

“What the fuck is this?” Bucky asked. Upon opening the doors to the parlor he’d discovered a scattered arraignment of bouquets, mismatched linens draped over chairs angled towards the light, papers scattered all over the circular table where Steve liked to sit to do his thinking. 

Steve looked up from the mess but the bustle of servants around him was unaffected by Bucky’s abrupt and graceless entrance. 

“Well,” Steve said. “Parliament pointed out that the law said only members of the royal family are immune to the death sentence. Which, by the way, you are. But they don't see it that way and there wasn't enough time to argue about it because-" Steve choked to a stop over the words he couldn't say. Bucky knew what they were. He was supposed to be executed at dawn. Hung.

"So I reminded Parliament about the Royal Pardon, which apparently I won’t have until after the coronation,” Steve said, clearing his throat as he tried to move past the unpleasant image of Bucky swining from his neck while crowds cheered.

“You’re moving up the coronation?” Bucky said, his voice climbing octaves like a balloon floating away into the vast blue sky. “You can’t-“

“Don’t worry,” Steve reassured him with his most reasonable tone. “The coronation is months away. We’re just getting married, that’s all. Blue tux or black, do you think?” Steve asked, looking down at fabric swatches.

“Blue for you, black for me,” Bucky replied automatically. “What do you mean, ‘married?’” he asked after a pause.

“Members of the royal family can’t be executed by law. And you know, I didn’t really want to argue with them about whether or not that still applied to you when all I’ve wanted to do for months is make you mine for good. So you’ll be on house arrest for a few months, but after the coronation-”

“Steve,” Bucky breathed. There was really nothing else to say.

“Bucky Barnes,” Steve asked with a big smile, rising from the table and bending down on one knee before his intended, “would you do me the honor of being my Queen?”

“You fucking asshole,” Bucky breathed, pulling Steve up and kissing him vigorously. Some tiny spark of hope was reignited in Bucky. Maybe everything would be okay afterall.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always welcome! :)


End file.
